Of floors, stools, chairs, and (finally) a table

I've had more fun than I expected with photos of the sparsely furnished dining room on Facebook.  Enough fun that the dining room gets its own post to chronicle its evolution toward full functionality. Here's what it looked like when we saw the house in December.  It had two characteristics that we really like: lots of natural light, and tile floors.  There's this strange obsession with carpets in houses over here.  Now that we've been here a month during winter, I can sympathize because the carpets do a better job of buffering cold from your feet (although I do regret sending my slippers in the sea shipment).  That concession aside, we didn't think having some of our young children eat in a carpeted dining room was a good idea (ahem, Clare).  Access to natural light is valuable because of that whole thing regarding short days and lots of rain.

Kristine actually spent several lunches at the house with the younger girls before we officially moved in.  The sequence would be drop Elise off at school, then come up to the house.  They're the right size to be set up with a stool in the alcove.

The stool is going to be forever lodged in my head as where Charis sat while she taught herself to read.  A friendly family from St. Giles Church in Derby loaned us a set of books called the Read at Home collection, which go through increasing levels of difficulty with the same characters.  She still needs a little help with a couple of the higher level books, but she's got the rest down pat.

Elise hadn't eaten in the house until the weekend when we moved out of the apartment.  She got the plastic trunk.

Kristine and I got the floor.  That afternoon I drove into Chellaston to pick up the furniture we'd bought from the Freys when they returned to the US.  Steve gets some credit for putting the blog idea in my head, but the furniture (because between it and the air shipment we were able to move into the house without the sea shipment being here) and the time that he and Kuk graciously took out of their own busy reentry preparations to have lunch with us on our house-hunting trip are the gifts I'm really grateful for.

Thanks to some kind help from one of my colleagues here, we did get the table put together.

Which the girls were very happy about.  Although in this picture they're also happy to be eating Tesco shortbread.  It was the closest we got to celebrating Burns Night (that and listening to a couple performances of Address to a Haggis on YouTube).